Internet Explorer 8 to launch late 2008

That’s right folks, we’ve just got done fixing all of our sites to render properly in IE7 while still maintaining 100% valid (X)HTML and CSS, and they’re dropping the latest IE bomb on us, by the end of 2008, according to Bill Veghte, who heads up Microsoft’s Windows and online services division.

But just how big will this bomb be, and how much will it ruin some websites? According to Microsoft, IE8 is rumored to be 100% standards compliant. As much of the development world knows, IE7 was also rumored to be 100% compliant, however it seems that…well, somebody didn’t know a whole lot about standards, as we can see in almost all valid websites, there are CSS hacks and tricks that are simply necessary for IE7. No worries though, according to Microsoft, there will be a “render using IE7 engine” option for the new version of Internet Explorer.

Actually, this isn’t an “option” per se, this is something that web developers would have to do themselves. There will be a special “tag” that you can add to the top of all your websites, that will tell IE8 to render in IE7 mode. Microsoft was concerned about their standards compliant browser “breaking the web”, and their concerns have been seen in their first beta release in March. So they added the ability for developers to work around this. How will this tag be seen by the W3C is yet to be known. Will it break the validity of your site? Let’s hope not. But hey, if you’re a developer, and your site is coded correctly, and 100% valid, then it should work in IE8 without this tag, and simply need the usual IE6 and IE7 hacks, right? Boy I sure hope so.

We will look at the new security features rumored to be coming with IE8 in a later post!